Custom Search extension for IE7

2006-08-10 · Hacking, Internet, Microsoft

Open registry editor and add a new key under

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchScopes\

This is the place from where IE7 (Microsoft Internet Explorer 7) builds search engine details. Now the things are obvious, add two string values named “DisplayName” & “URL”. For example if you want to add a Google Blog search, use URL as http://www.blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q={searchTerms}

Here {searchTerm} is the string appeared in the search text box.

There is one more way you can incorporate search engines called ‘Search Engine Assistants’. On adding following items to your registry it adds a WikiPedia and MSN search assistants to IE. This mean when you type ‘wp msn’ in address bar, it goes to WikiPedia for the definition for MSN.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\m]
@=“http://beta.search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%s”
“%”=“%25”
“&”=“%26”
“+”=“%2B”

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\wp]
@=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s”
“ “=”_”
“%”=“%25”
“&”=“%26”
“+”=“%2B”

Rest of the items defines what to be replaced; i.e. “%” will be replaced by %25 (encoded URL)

~ Ankit